Elevating manufacturing plant maintenance with an enhanced customer experience
Overview
Eastman is a global specialty materials company that produces a broad range of products, including heat transfer fluids (HTF) for manufacturing plants. To radically improve their customers’ experience, Eastman teamed up with Slalom to create Fluid Genius™. This groundbreaking app blends artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and decades of field expertise to optimize complex processes, ensuring the company’s clients can take advantage of actionable insights to ensure machinery uptime.
Scope
Product Strategy, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, Experience Design, Solution Ownership, Machine Learning
Technology
Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, S3, Amazon Aurora, Vue.js, Salesforce, Azure AD B2B, Azure Git/DevOps
Heat transfer fluid (HTF) is the lifeblood of manufacturing plants. It’s critical for efficiently transferring heat across systems in various industrial and commercial processes. Pump failure is dangerous, expensive, time consuming, and could result in unplanned downtime. One hiccup could spell operational and financial disaster.
Testing is everything when it comes to prevention.
However, maintenance engineers often cannot easily capture, reference, and act on data obtained from their efforts. With paper and spreadsheets as the primary methods for logging information, leveraging data to surface actionable insights upon which to base solid decisions is challenging. These manual, archaic processes leave room for errors and inefficiencies and hold engineers back from customizing their maintenance plans and budgets, obtaining the insights they need to be proactive to prevent unforeseen shutdowns, and conduct safe and reliable operations.
In addition to the lack of transparency of their heat transfer fluid, maintenance engineers sometimes forget to collect and test fluid samples from plant machinery. Since many of these professionals are responsible for multiple plants, they found it incredibly challenging to manage testing schedules and know what work has been done, and sometimes even redone if records weren’t well maintained.
It really started with our management thinking about how we can improve our customers’ experience. We felt intuitively there was a need to do more for our customers.
— Mark Brucks, Specialty Fluids Segment Marketing Manager, Eastman
A transformation guided by customer needs
Eastman felt there had to be an easier and more modern way to support its customers. The goal? To create a digital tool that improves this process and delivers real time, actionable insights while making the expertise of Eastman’s technical service experts available at the fingertips of both their global clientele and users of almost any other brand of heat transfer fluid.
Making historical customer data actionable today
Eastman’s chemical technology experts partnered with Slalom to leverage almost 50 years of sample analysis data and match it with customer maintenance and incident logs to establish detailed insights on fluid chemistry.
The result is Fluid Genius™, a highly advanced digital platform built on a modern cloud and data architecture foundation. This multi award winning, patent pending heat transfer fluid management app uses predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to revolutionize HTF life cycle management. It radically optimizes and re invents how operations managers and engineers collect, monitor, and forecast information on their heat transfer fluids.
Fluid Genius: An award-winning app
2022
Energy Industries Council (EIC), Innovation and Company of the Year in North and Central America
Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS), Best Digital Innovation from a Large Company
German Design Council, German Innovation Award, Excellence in Business to Business
CIO 100 Award, Enterprise Excellence
2021
Plant Engineering, Product of the Year, Bronze Award
Chemical Processing, Vaaler Award
Process Worldwide, Top 8 Emerging Technologies
Nullam id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue.
— Eastman
Transforming once tedious manual processes into an easy-to-use app, Fluid Genius provides digital sample kit deliveries and reminders to ensure maintenance engineers never miss out on testing. Real time action alerts and customized recommendations are sent out to users. Eastman’s customers are also empowered to increase their knowledge of heat transfer fluids. Thanks to the robust educational content available via an online knowledge base and expert technical support, they now have valuable information at their fingertips.
Fluid Genius helps track all work performed, assisting users to make smarter choices and ensuring proper knowledge transfer among staff. Employee efficiency is heightened with hundreds of hours of busy work disappearing thanks to increased access to data. Information capture is improved due to the elimination of redundant data documented on paper or in spreadsheets.
Using artificial intelligence and adaptive machine learning, Fluid Genius gives a unique and immediate measure of overall fluid condition, helping Eastman’s customers establish when to replace their heat transfer fluid. Robust predictive analytics are used to determine when to replace their fluids. Maintenance engineers can now move from preventative to predictive maintenance. Enhanced scenario planning capabilities eliminate costly surprises with fluid replacement expenses.
Overall, the increased visibility maintenance engineers have gained from Fluid Genius improves strategic decision-making capabilities thanks to rich data in historical views that empower data driven decisions.
Eastman’s customers are extending the life of their heat transfer fluid investment, resulting in cost savings. They are seeing dramatic improvements in the performance of their heat transfer systems and benefitting from reduced downtime, operational stability, and efficiency.
Satisfying customers pays off
In the fast-paced world of manufacturing, time is money, and reliability is non-negotiable. Eastman’s Fluid Genius™ is more than just a state-of-the-art app; it’s a transformative tool that is redefining heat transfer fluid management.
Engineers and operational managers are not just averting potential crises; they are now empowered to predict and plan to avoid them. From the reduction in downtime and costs to the elevation in data accuracy and employee efficiency, the benefits are sweeping and profound. Instead of sifting through stacks of historical data and paperwork, everything is now available at the touch of a screen, saving time that can now be invested in more strategic, value adding tasks.
As a result, Eastman’s clients are not only achieving heightened levels of operational reliability but are also realizing significant financial gains, all while enjoying a seamless user experience. Fluid Genius™ is not merely an innovation but an industrial revolution, driving unparalleled value and resilience for Eastman’s global clientele.
Kawasaki